London, United Kingdom – On a sunny autumn day, Hiba Express – a fast food chain located in Holborn, a bustling area of central London full of restaurants, bookstores and boutiques – is teeming with diners. Above Hiba is Palestine House, a multi-story gathering place for Palestinians and their supporters, built in the style of a traditional Arab house with stone walls and a central courtyard with a fountain.
Osama Qashoo, a charismatic man with hair pulled back into a bun and a thick beard and mustache ending in impressive curls, runs Palestine House in the six-story building. (He co-founded Hiba Express in 2012 and was involved with the restaurant until 2020.)
At Hiba Express, the team serves Palestinian and Lebanese dishes. Inside the space, decorated with warm colors, tree branches and signs with slogans such as “From the river to the sea”, customers move halloumi cheese, chickpeas and falafel into their plates. At the entrance to the restaurant, a doll dressed in a black and white keffiyeh sits on a table with a sign above it, written in blood-colored ink: “Save the children.” This refers to the thousands of Palestinian children killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza over the past year.
On several tables are cherry-red soda cans decorated with the black, white and green stripes of the Palestinian flag as well as Arabic artwork, and bordered with a keffiyeh pattern. “Gaza Cola” is written in Arabic calligraphy – in a script similar to that of a popular brand of cola.
It’s a drink with a message and a mission.
Qashoo, 43, is quick to point out that the drink, made with typical cola ingredients and having a sweet and sour taste similar to Coca-Cola, “is totally different from the formula used by Coke.” He will not say how or where the recipe came from, but he will say that he created Gaza Cola in November 2023.
“The true taste of freedom”
Nynke Brett, 53, who lives in Hackney, east London, discovered Gaza Cola while attending a cultural event at Palestine House. “It’s not as fizzy as Coca-Cola. It’s softer, easier on the palate,” she says. “And it’s even better because you support Palestine.”
Qashoo created Gaza Cola for several reasons, he said, but “the first was to boycott companies that support and fuel the Israeli army and support the genocide” in Gaza. Another reason: “Rediscover a taste without guilt, without genocide. The true taste of freedom.
It may sound like a marketing slogan, but Palestinian freedom is close to Qashoo’s heart. In 2001, he co-founded the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a group that uses nonviolent direct action to challenge and resist the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land.
This organization paved the way for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement four years later, Qashoo explains. BDS boycotts companies and products that they believe play a direct role in Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.
Qashoo was forced to flee Palestine in 2003 after organizing peaceful protests against what he calls the “apartheid wall” – a separation barrier built by Israel inside the West Bank, recognized as the barrier between Israel and the Palestinian territory.
He arrived in the UK as a refugee and became a film student, determined to communicate Palestinian stories through film. His trilogy, A Palestine Journey, won the Tel Aviv Tribune New Horizon Prize in 2006.
In 2007, Qashoo co-founded the Free Gaza Movement, which aimed to break the illegal siege of Gaza. Three years later, in 2010, he helped organize the Gaza Freedom Flotilla mission to deliver humanitarian aid from Turkey to Gaza by sea. In May 2010, one of the flotilla’s ships, the Mavi Marmara, was attacked and Qashoo lost its cameraman and filming equipment.
He was later arrested and tortured while detained with nearly 700 others. His family went on a hunger strike until he was safe.
After resettling in the United Kingdom, Qashoo continued his activism, but struggled to make a living through film. He then became a restaurateur. But he never imagined becoming a soft drink supplier. “I didn’t even think about it” until the end of last year, Qashoo says. He adds that he also wanted to create a product that was “an example of commerce, not aid.”
Fifty-three percent of consumers in the Middle East and North Africa are boycotting products from certain brands because of recent wars and conflicts, George Shaw, an analyst at GlobalData, told Tel Aviv Tribune.
“These companies that are fueling this genocide, when you hit them where it matters most, which is the source of revenue, it certainly makes a big difference and gives them pause,” Qashoo says. Gaza Cola, he adds, “will build a boycott movement” which will hit Coke financially.
Coca-Cola, which operates facilities in the Israeli industrial settlement of Atarot in occupied East Jerusalem, faced a new boycott starting October 7 last year.
Family was also a factor in Qashoo’s desire to launch Gaza Cola. Today, he does not know the whereabouts of his 17-year-old adopted son in the West Bank, who was shot in the head in June.
“I have family in Gaza who were decimated,” Qashoo explains. “I have friends, I don’t know where they are.”
Unwilling to compromise
Although it only lasted a year, Qashoo says creating Gaza Cola was a challenge. “Gaza Cola was a very hard and painful process because I am not an expert in the beverage industry,” says Qashoo. “Each potential partner suggested a compromise: compromise the color, compromise the font, compromise the name, compromise the flag,” he says. “And we said, ‘No, we’re not compromising on any of this.’
Creating the drink logo was tricky. “How do you create a brand that is clear and doesn’t beat around the bush? » said Qashoo with twinkling eyes and a cheeky smile. “Gaza Cola is simple, with honest and clear messages. »
However, finding places to store the drink, produced in Poland and imported to the UK to save money, was a problem. “Obviously we can’t access the big markets because of the policies behind that,” says Qashoo.
He started by asking Hiba Express and other local Palestinian restaurants to offer Gaza Cola. The drink is also sold by Muslim retailers like Manchester-based Al Aqsa, which was recently out of stock, according to store manager Mohammed Hussain. Since the beginning of August, 500,000 cans of Gaza Cola have been sold.
Online, a six-pack of Gaza Cola costs £12 ($15). For comparison, a six-pack of Coca-Cola sells for around 4.70 pounds ($6).
Qashoo says all profits from the drink will be donated to the reconstruction of the maternity ward at al-Karama hospital, northwest of Gaza City.
A wave of boycotts
Gaza Cola is among other brands raising awareness about Palestine and the boycott of major cola brands operating in Israel.
Palestine Drinks, a Swedish company launched in February, sells an average of 3 to 4 million cans of drinks (including a cola) per month, co-founder Mohamed Kiswani told Tel Aviv Tribune. Matrix Cola, established in Jordan in 2008 as a local alternative to Coca-Cola and Pepsi and which operates its main SodaStream factory in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, reported in January that its production had doubled in recent months. And Spiro Spathis, Egypt’s oldest soft drinks company, saw its sales increase significantly during its “100% Made in Egypt” campaign last year.
Jeff Handmaker, associate professor of legal sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands, says consumer boycotts aim to hold companies accountable by raising awareness of corporate or institutional complicity in criminal atrocities.
“In this respect, the Coca-Cola boycott campaign is clearly successful,” adds Handmaker.
Qashoo is currently working on the next version of Gaza Cola, a more sparkling version. In the meantime, he hopes that every sip of Gaza Cola reminds people of the plight of Palestine.
“We must remember, generation after generation, this horrible holocaust,” he said. “This is happening and has been happening for 75 years.”
“It just needs to be a small, gentle reminder, like: ‘By the way, bon appetit, greetings from Palestine.’
